Training Sessions at the 34th IARIW General Conference, Dresden, Germany, August 21-27, 2016

Training Sessions at the 34th IARIW General Conference, Dresden, Germany, August 21-27, 2016

The IARIW is offering twoconcurrent training sessions immediately preceding the General Conference on the topics of national accounts and multidimensional poverty. Details on the sessions are found below. The sessions are open to individual IARIW members as well as employees of IARIW institutional members at no charge. As space may be limited, persons interested are encouraged to register as soon as possible. The deadline for registration is June 30, 2016. A minimum of 10 persons are required for a training session to go ahead. If this number of registrants is not achieved by June 30, the session will be cancelled. To register, download and complete this form, save it and then email the form to info@iariw.org. Registrations will be acknowledged within three days.

The training sessions will be held all day August 20 and 21.

Session on National Accounts

The course in based on the second edition (October 2014) of the OECD manual “Understanding National Accounts” by François Lequiller and Derek Blades. The manual is available free on line. The chapters referenced in the time-table are those of the manual.

The course is voluntarily directed to non-experts. While it covers the theoretical definition of the main national accounts aggregates, it does so in a lively manner based on the concrete experience of the teacher (including as a number-cruncher), and on some exercises. François Lequiller has been the head of the French national accounts and has a wide international experience (OECD, IMF, Eurostat). He will explain the sources from which aggregates are derived, and, last but not least,will discuss their quality and their limitations. A part of the course will cover the themes that have been recently dubbed as “beyond GDP”: well-being and globalisation.The duration of the course is of 16 hours, in 8 sessions of two hours each.

The power points of the course will be circulated to the attendees one week before the course. A hand-held calculator would be useful.

Session on Multidimensional Poverty (TBA)

Poverty is now recognized to be multidimensional. This has led to a rising demand for rigorous and transparent measures of multidimensional poverty that can incorporate ordinal data and be used to guide policy. Many methodologies are available, ranging from dominance analyses to composite indices to fuzzy set approaches, to statistically derived indices. In recent years, counting-based approaches with clearly specified properties have come to particular prominence.

This course provides a brief overview of differing methodologies to measure multidimensional poverty, as well as motivations for doing so. It elaborates in greater detail a particular counting-based axiomatic class of measures, and focuses on one member of this class of measures that has been extensively applied. The class is appropriate to persons in national statistical offices considering measuring multidimensional poverty, or for academics and researchers intending to construct and analyse multidimensional poverty.

After introductory sessions on motivation and methodologies, this course presents the structure and properties of the focal measure, together with its consistent sub- and partial indices, which are used to guide policy. Empirical examples are provided.

The class then elaborates key steps of measurement design and analysis. Students will be provided with a template stata .dofile they can adapt, which generates the measure and consistent indices, as well as standard errors, robustness tests, and tests for inference. Key points in empirical applications will be covered, illustrated by examples as well as exercises. Extensions such as analysis of changes over time, and econometric analysis, are briefly introduced.